On the Road to Innsbruck and Back

In northeastern Pennsylvania during the coalminers' strike of 1926, when I was four, I remember, as in a dream, watching mounted policemen wheeling their heavy horses on the brick street below the screened-in porch of our apartment. I can recall the blur of violence and the clatter of hooves on the street as striking miners cowered beneath the bent backs and the furious clubs of blue-clad cops. And then the somber street was quiet and empty, with broken billy clubs and unexpected blood in the gutter.

In Nanticoke in the thirties you could go to the little candy store in the middle of our block and buy two cigarettes for a penny and listen to Charley Hall. The farmers had so many cabbages that they couldn't give them away. In the Middle West the farmers were killing pigs and burying them; in California the farmers were spraying kerosene on their oranges so that the oranges wouldn't be fit to eat. People all over America were starving. The farm belt was now the dust bowl. The banks were foreclosing on the little guy. John L. Lewis was in bed with the mine owners. Back on the hill old women were picking coal on the culm banks so that they could heat their homes. The rich were the bloodsuckers of the poor. Capitalism had failed. Workers of the world unite. Join the Communist party. Save the world for humanity and human justice.

Right before Pearl Harbor, when I was at Penn State, I came out of Man Hunt, a movie, at about ten o'clock one Saturday night to find other college students moving along the downtown sidewalk. That afternoon our football team had upset some team, and apparently everyone still felt like celebrating the end of a perfect day. Twenty or so students had just left a tavern or had just returned from a successful panty raid. I thought they were on their way to a fraternity beer party or something like that, and so I trailed along behind them. I had nothing better to do, and they were moving in my general direction.

I recognized the leader of the gang as the starting fullback on the team. Someone said something in a loud voice, and there were a few cheers and snatches of the school's fight song. But no one seemed drunk or looking for trouble. They were just a bunch of college kids. When we reached the end of the business section of the college town, the fullback, followed by everyone else, crossed the street and turned back toward the lighted center. There hadn't been a destination after all. By this time our group had grown to about a hundred, and I was now in the middle of a small army.

Almost all of the business places were closed. I didn't see anybody who had the easy authority of a cop, a businessman, a professor, a dean, a coach. No one asked us why we were clogging the sidewalk. "What's the big idea?" If we had been told to break it up or in some way stopped, I don't know what would have happened. We could have just called the whole thing off, or someone might have reacted badly. "What the hell have we done?" "Who the hell are you?" "Do you own the sidewalk?" But no confrontation occurred: our movement was unimpeded.

I don't know what prompted it, but all at once our leader, the fullback, bashed one of the parking meters with a club. I don't know where the club came from or why he did it. Maybe he had a grudge against parking meters. He banged another one and then a third. As if by magic, bashing parking meters became the thing to do. Every parking meter was being hammered with clubs or sticks or fraternity paddles, which were now in evidence. The ring of wood on metal and the splatter of wood on glass broke the peaceful night. Some guys even crossed the street to get at the parking meters on the other side.

All at once the sidewalk was empty: everyone was out in the middle of the street in a frenzy of going nowhere. And now there must have been two hundred of us. You could feel the surge of energy: somebody was always bumping into you, but no one cared. A car would come toward you and then abruptly turn down a sidestreet. One car stopped and turned off its lights until the mob thinned out. Somebody banged a fender with his hand. Somebody else punched a window with his fist. Then somebody broke the windshield of a parked car on the other side of the street with a club or a paddle, and a horn blared out the news. Another parked car was being rocked from side to side, from side to side, and then, just like that, the car was up on its two wheels; it hesitated a moment, and then toppled over on its side with a metallic thud. A boy stood in the street foolishly kicking one of the tires.

Someone shoved an opened bottle of beer in my hands. Some enterprising scholar must have confiscated cases of the stuff. Soon empty bottles were flying through the air and smashing into whatever happened to be in the way. There was a cry; someone had been hit. Then one of the bottles managed to find the window of a clothing store, and somebody's foot banged in the door of a jewelry shop, and the looting began. "Look what I found." "Where are the hats?" And then the fire whistle was blowing, and cops and volunteer firemen were among us. Adults were gathering on the sidewalk in safe clusters, and the mob started to break up. It wasn't as if we had a cause to keep us together, and the cops didn't use force, which could have driven us to band together. I decided that it was time to cut out of there; I managed to make it to my rooming house without any trouble. I hadn’t been violent or violated. All I had contributed to the wild occasion was the consumption of a bottle of warm beer.

After Pearl Harbor, during Homecoming or some such weekend, random violence in the college town was commonplace. At a beer party two guys would get into a fight over a girl, or some guy would set out to prove to a football player that he too was a tough guy. There was a gangbang at the fraternity across the street. In my fraternity at Homecoming one of the actives used a scissors to snip off the expensive tie of a napping old grad. Boy, was that geezer furious when he woke up. Once, while drunk, I broke into some neighbor's house, confiscated a hat from the hall closet, tore out its silk lining, and, with the brim pinned up, wore it all evening. When the Rube got drunk and passed out in the street, we rolled him into the gutter so that he wouldn't get run over.